Maybe the Deficit Needs to Get More Personal

Sitting in the Art Deco Logan Square Auditorium on Wednesday, I couldn’t help wondering about the validity of the mantra of self-styled hard-bitten reporters and pricey consultants, usually uttered with reflexive gravitas: “All politics are local.”

For 90 minutes, the two-term Alderman Rey Colon (35th Ward) faced two earnest challengers, Nancy Schiavone, a lawyer, and Miguel Sotomayor, a worker at the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority, in a tepid debate sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce.

As about 100 citizens listened attentively on a freezing night, the candidates mixed banal calls for “greater transparency,” “building relationships” and “engaging in dialogue” with Mr. Sotomayor’s well-rehearsed staccato refrains of “This election is about you!” and, most relevant, with their collective immersion in the weeds of the ward.

One heard about potholes on Avondale Avenue; traffic problems around the Illinois Centennial Monument where Logan, Milwaukee and Kedzie Avenues meet; the utility of city subsidies given to small businesses like the Busy Beaver Button Company; tales of allegedly capricious building inspectors; clashing notions on spending tax increment financing dollars; and, most passionate of all, consensus chagrin about the vagaries of residential permit parking.

In all, it made the surprisingly somnolent big election in our midst, where the Mayor in Waiting plays his cards like a wily gambler who’s been dealt a royal flush, resemble a Cirque du Soleil extravaganza.

You’d think that the alderman or his challengers — or the chamber or the audience — might wonder what should be done. After all, how one deals with that mess would seem to dovetail with whether one can fix those potholes or pay for $250,000 traffic-control boxes. You’d think an opening or closing statement might obliquely allude to it.

But there was nothing about cuts in services or pensions or about ways to increase revenue. At least the topic had been broached that morning at a Rogers Park Mexican restaurant as Joe Moore, the five-term 49th Ward incumbent, faced Brian White, a serious-minded community development specialist, in a more substantive discussion.

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Might it perhaps be that all politics are personal, while all problems are citywide and, increasingly, global?

For sure, traffic around the monument, or drug-dealing and loitering around the 49th Ward’s Howard Street L stop, are a daily presence more tangible than, say, stories about colossal deficits. But vacant lots, stiff parking tickets and teenage thugs on L platforms are unavoidably immediate manifestations of a municipal financial crisis.

It probably wouldn’t hurt if our candidates suffused the earnest with a pinch of vitality.

It’s why I was heartened to run into Greg Hinz, a columnist for Crain’s, who earlier in the day moderated a forum for candidates in the 46th Ward. The jockeying there is to succeed the retiring longtime aldermanic legend, Helen Shiller, doyenne of the disenfranchised.

Speaking to a small group at the Chicago Club that evening, Mr. Hinz indicated that the refreshing field includes a refugee from Ethiopia who fled war, a lesbian lawyer of Japanese descent, a street cop apparently fluent in Arabic and Japanese, and a ward superintendent with a ponytail who was formerly a Franciscan friar and has an M.B.A. from Northwestern.

In addition, there’s someone whom Mr. Hinz calls a “business scion who apparently enjoyed working as a congressional aide more than schlepping men’s clothes,” a Shiller chum whose style and speech suggests he’s exited a 1960s time capsule, a self-proclaimed “Oriental medicine specialist” via Hong Kong, a social worker who runs a business group and once headed a gay Catholic organization, and a Republican who served as general manager of the Royal Australian Circus.

Now, what if that group were running for mayor? Given our challenge in confronting looming travail, maybe we would be better off with a Republican who once ran a circus.

jwarren@chicagonewscoop.org

A version of this article appears in print on February 11, 2011, on Page A23A of the National edition with the headline: Maybe the Deficit Needs To Get More Personal. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe